


Home is in the Ground

by arkosic



Series: The Settlement We Called Palamon [4]
Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-31
Updated: 2017-01-31
Packaged: 2018-09-21 03:29:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9529709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arkosic/pseuds/arkosic
Summary: All Guardians have a strange relationship with death, but Shin's circumstances make it all the stranger.





	

Shin dies for the first time when a Guardian puts an armour-piercing round through his chest. It enters below his right collarbone and rips out the other side above his left hip, and he hits the ground so fast that the following mercy shot wastes its courtesy on a concrete piling instead.

He comes to shaking, wedged up the far end of a cracked and dusty drain pipe with his murderer crouched at the mouth. Her helmet is tucked under one arm, and he can see the pursed lips, the concerned frown, the shake of her head as she looks over her shoulder to say something to a pair of legs standing behind her, voice low and indignant. Jaren’s Ghost hovers too close, her soft glow reflecting dully off the still-wet streaks painted broad and puddling in the cracks. A plain trail to his position, but his blood no longer. No telling what has taken its place.

He is two years after Palamon. He is four months after Jaren.

“Why did you drag it out so long?” the Guardian calls up to him, baffled and defensive. He has made her an unwilling perpetrator with his pain. “Nobody’ll pick your Ghost off in a match, kid, it’s safe to let go.”

He is not dead.

He is not dead.

He is not dead.

 

“Dead is relative,” the Vanguard tells him: the smiling Hunter, the stern-faced woman, the man with glossy blue skin and the token features of a Bright-Eyes. Three speaking for thousands. He supposes, doubtfully, that it could be better than one speaking for a hundred.

“Dead is a simplification,” the Speaker tells him, the clean white of his mask so sharp that Shin can only look at it sidelong. They give him a room with a window, and all windows point towards the Traveler; he tries to see it the way the Guardians do – sleeping, dormant, wounded – and keeps thinking _empty_.

“Dead is inevitable,” the old woman says, most truthful of all, and lets him doze in the shadows of her stall behind the stacks of feather-bright fabrics.

 

A hard truth: only the dead go looking for a fight.

 

Shin sits alone in front of a fire for the first time as the last of nine seekers, and burns.

The weather is turning chill, yesterday’s wind a whistled warning of winter from across the river, but he cannot tell if he is keeping it at bay; he shivers, he sweats, he wipes a hand across his face and flinches from the ice-hot sting. The Light running through him has set hearts beating in hollow-chested corpses, and now he fears he will open his mouth and choke on ash.

He is two years after Palamon. He is one day, two hours, and forty-three minutes after Jaren.

“I feel wrong,” he says, teeth chattering. “I feel wrong all through. Am I dying?”

Jaren’s Ghost is a glint of silver on the other side of the fire, made hazy by the heat. He can feel the turn of its attention like a physical movement inside his head.

“Not anymore,” it says.


End file.
